Sakharov, Andrei (1921–1989)

The life and career of Andrei Sakharov as a scientist, a dissident, and a prisoner reflects numerous changes in 20th-century Russian history. Born in Moscow in 1921, Sakharov was trained as a physicist. After World War II, he helped design the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, which was exploded in August 1953. That same year, Sakharov was elected to full membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Sakharov became involved in the broader debate over nuclear weapons testing. He tried to stop Soviet nuclear testing in the atmosphere, fearing it would increase the dangers of nuclear fallout. But Premiere Nikita Khrushchev repeatedly rejected Sakharov's advice. This rebuff changed Sakharov's attitude toward the regime and he grew more independent-minded and critical of Kremlin policies.

By 1966, Sakharov was ready to express open political dissent. Leonid Brezhnev had come to power and he sought to reverse the process of de-Stalinization that Khrushchev had begun. Sakharov joined several appeals against the imprisonment of intellectual dissidents. In 1968, he circulated his famous essay Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. In it, Sakharov described the continuing legacy of Stalinist dictatorship in Soviet society and called on Kremlin leaders to accept a dialogue with their own citizens over how to address the country's ongoing problems.

The regime responded by removing his security clearance, ending his career as a weapons researcher. Over the next 12 years, Sakharov issued numerous appeals, attended demonstrations, spoke with Western journalists and diplomats, and met with activists from a wide range of backgrounds—Crimean Tatars, Jewish refuseniks, Ukrainian nationalists, and Lithuanian Catholics, for example—to demonstrate his solidarity with their suffering. On the day Sakharov was awarded the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, he was standing in the cold outside a Lithuanian courthouse, bearing witness to the unjust trial of a friend.

It was only in January 1980, after Sakharov denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that the Kremlin forcibly removed him from the capital. He was taken to Gorky, a closed city 250 miles east of Moscow. Isolated, subjected to physical assaults and the theft of the manuscript of his memoirs, Sakharov relied on his wife, Elena Bonner, who was still permitted to travel between Moscow and Gorky, to send further appeals and essays to the West. He also resorted to hunger strikes in order to compel the regime to allow her son's fiancée to leave the country and to ensure proper medical treatment for Bonner herself.

After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the new Soviet leader announced a series of liberal reforms. He also permitted Sakharov to return to Moscow in December 1986. Sakharov, at first, was an enthusiastic supporter of Gorbachev and felt heartened by the release of political prisoners and the country's expanded freedom of expression. But by 1989, Sakharov grew weary at the pace of Gorbachev's reforms and offered his own proposal for a new constitutional framework for the country. But his sudden death on December 14, 1989, brought his struggle to an end.